


I'll check in tomorrow if I don't wake up dead

by synthiesia



Series: The world is just a teller and we are wearing black masks [8]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Fake AH Crew, Gen, Immortal Fake AH Crew, No Proofreading We Die Like Men, Pre-Fake AH Crew, guess who's back bitches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25560223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthiesia/pseuds/synthiesia
Summary: It wasn’t often that Geoff got asked how he started. How he came to be the kingpin of Los Santos. Most people were too afraid to ask. And most of the ones who weren’t already knew the answer.Geoff had been in the business a long time. Longer than any of the other Fakes.Geoff's backstory for the immortal Fake AH Crew au
Relationships: Jack Pattillo & Geoff Ramsey, Joel Heyman & Jack Pattillo
Series: The world is just a teller and we are wearing black masks [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/630137
Comments: 13
Kudos: 20





	I'll check in tomorrow if I don't wake up dead

**Author's Note:**

> i am sORRY I DISAPPEARED. i uh. stopped writing, went through an abusive/toxic/gaslighting friendship/relationship, graduated college, moved states, and finally started writing again because of the pandemic
> 
> also i can't say this chapter feels like a good triumphant return to writing because like,,,most of it had been finished already. i just edited some shit and wrapped it up. the next chapter, however, is gonna be way better. because this series is gonna be continued now. i have like a third of the next chapter written already. it actually goes into *how* ryan died since his chapter doesn't tackle that at all. and it's awesome.
> 
> title comes from the song alone together by fall out boy.

It wasn’t often that Geoff got asked how he started. How he came to be the kingpin of Los Santos. Most people were too afraid to ask.

Most of the ones who weren’t already knew the answer. Geoff had been in the business a long time. Longer than any of the other Fakes.

He’d been in his late 20’s when he met Burnie Burns. Had joined the military fresh out of high school, did his time in the Rangers- longer than he’d even planned to, really- and was back in Los Santos with shit all to do. He didn’t really have any job prospects, and didn’t really have any plans to go back to school- that was, after all why he had joined the military in the first place. 

And then he met Burnie Burns. Burnie was still young, too, and idealistic. He wanted to run Los Santos. 

And fuck, why not? There was good money involved, and Geoff’s moral compass had always been a little bit skewed. 

The group ended up being Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Joel Heyman, and Gus Sorola. 

Burnie and Matt had met each other in college. Now they were in debt, and had very few prospects. That was around the same time they met Joel, too neurotic to stay in school, not quite good enough to cut it in Vinewood. 

They met Gus and Geoff around the same time, in Los Santos. Both of them just bumming it, drinking their lives away without any real plan.

The five of them really weren’t cut out to be criminal masterminds.

They were just sort of winging it. 

Gus had some…less than savory friends, and they purchased some cheap guns from them. They started with ski masks and dark hoodies. They were shitty criminals, but they were criminals nonetheless. 

They robbed banks and convenience stores, and it was mostly just through luck that they were ever successful. 

But they were successful. And the police- and the city- took notice. 

They named themselves the Roosters. Geoff’s not super sure how it happened, but they were drunk and it seemed like a good idea at the time. He got a rooster tattoo, sprawling across his back, to match. And then it was settled. They were the Roosters. And they tried to make a name for themselves as such.

They were mostly just agents of chaos. Plans never went accordingly, and they rarely came out better than they started. But they wreaked havoc in the city. They caused more trouble than anyone before them ever had. And they were never caught.

Matt and Gus did recon. Made plans, worked the kinks out. Did all the behind the scenes stuff, all the tech stuff.

Geoff, Burnie, and Joel did the violent part. Joel handled explosives, Burnie handled the money, and Geoff handled everything else. He was good at taking care of it, of thinking on his feet once everything had gone to shit. And he was good with guns- it was a skill he had picked up in the military, and he’d always excelled at it. 

They often got hurt, but never too bad. And they always met back up, patched each other up.

They thought they would rule the world. They started to have a hand in everything in the city- the drugs, the guns, all of it. They were what everyone wanted to be. They were the sort of gangsters that 10, 20 years later, people made movies about. Living life a little too recklessly, a little too on the edge. Doing drugs and messing around with things they didn’t quite understand. 

It years for things to go wrong. But when it, it did in a spectacular way. They found themselves cornered. Gunned down in the street, just like a scene out of a film. Blood splattered everywhere, their bodies left behind, their plans ruined. 

And then, miraculously, they found themselves waking back up.

They’d played it off, of course, as the police’s incompetence. It’s not like there had bene many witnesses, and people were looking for any explanation to make it make sense. 

But they knew the truth. They died and they lived and after some experimentation they discovered it didn’t matter how they died. They just couldn’t stay dead.

And that definitely changed some things.

They didn’t know for sure about Gus and Matt. They hadn’t been there that day on the street, so there was no way of knowing for sure whether or not they really were immortal. And no one was really willing to risk it, to try and test whether or not this strange occurrence affected them too.

Instead, Burnie, Joel, and Geoff proceeded to rule Los Santos even better than before. Now they had an edge, the sort that led them to being able to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. It allowed them to truly live up to their full potential as the Kings of Los Santos. It wasn’t, after all, like they didn’t have competition. 

It was the 80’s- everyone wanted to be a gangster. 

But for the couple of decades, it didn’t matter. They had an iron fist on the city- nothing went on without their knowledge. 

And that continued all the way into the twenty first century, when they met Jack.

It was a wild sort of heist. And they had gotten separated. Geoff was stuck hiding out in a bathroom of a gas station, using feminine products to cover a bullet scrape that was bleeding on his arm. Burnie was hiding in the backseat of their car, parked near a park at the edge of the city.

And Joel? Joel had been chased out to the edge of town, where he found himself crashing into Jack Patillo’s life. He convinced him to patch him up, and slept on his couch for several days, which was the beginning of a long friendship. 

Jack…Jack took care of him. He watched out for Joel, until the rest of the Roosters came by to collect him. 

And the Joel just kept coming back. He liked Jack, and trusted him, and he didn’t have a whole lot of friends to begin with. And they got along well.

Geoff came by, too, when he wasn’t busy. Jack was the sort of person that was easy to get along with, and he didn’t judge them, didn’t judge the Roosters and what they did. Plus, the dude just seemed…safe. Friendly. He was the sort of person who wasn’t going to rat them out, who could view them as people and not just an entity. He was the sort of person who seemed like he was used to rolling with the punches, whatever they may be.

It’s why, when a headshot had Joel out of commission and their coms went dead, when they were stuck out on the edge of the city with no way to contact Gus or Matt, no way to get themselves to safety, Geoff decided, fuck it, if he could handle us being gangsters he can handle us being immortal, too, and barged into Jack’s house, a panicking Burnie and a dead Joel in tow.

Jack had, understandably, panicked. He and Joel were friends, after all, and most people are not equipped to see their friends lying with a bullet in their head on their living room floor. All things considered, he had taken it remarkably better than most when, just shy of an hour later, Joel had sat up to complain about a “overwhelming migraine, god does anyone mind if I smoke while we wait for those fuckers to move on?”

Maybe that should have clued them in to what Jack was.

It wasn’t until months later, in the quiet of night, seated next to each other sharing a drink, that Jack admitted to Geoff what he had long suspected- that he hadn’t just been marked as KIA when those planes went down, but that he had actually died. He eventually told the rest of the Roosters, and after that even Burnie relaxed, figured that must mean they could trust Jack.

They fell into a routine of sorts. Geoff and Joel found themselves at Jack’s just as often as they were anywhere else, and it became a haven of sorts. It was somewhere they could go to get away from the constant mounting question about what to do about Matt and Gus, who kept aging, even as all the rest of them stayed still.

It was a worry of theirs. It was starting to get to all of them. But none more so than Joel.

It started small.

Joel had always had a neurotic personality. He’d always been this side of maudlin, a sort of high energy, stressed despondent they’d only ever seen on him. That was normal. Him beginning to wonder about why they were immortal? What the point was, how it effected them long term?

That seemed pretty par for the course with Joel’s “worry of the week”. That seemed like the sort of thing that they could brush over. So they did.

They shouldn’t have.

They died a lot. That was fairly normal- they had a sort of carelessness that came from being newly immortal.

So they didn’t notice, at first, when Joel’s death count seemed to greatly surpass theirs. They didn’t notice when he stayed up later and later, smoked more and more. Went out late at night and came back with blood splattered across the side of his head, the black, and a wild, dark look in his eyes. 

They didn’t notice him cracking into pieces in front of them.

And then one day Geoff and Joel were hanging out at Jack’s house- as they were want to do- and Joel asked a question.

“Do you think if we killed each other enough times it will be permanent?” Joel asked all sorts of questions, and normally Jack and Geoff didn’t pay him any mind. But there was something almost too casual about the way he asked, like he didn’t _want_ them to think about it. Which, of course, meant that they did.

It meant that they thought about all of the more recent deaths, of Joel goofing off and stepping in the line of fire and going out and coming home late.

They were far to drunk to confront him on it. But Geoff brought it up with Burnie, later, and about a week or so later they corned him on it.

It was not a good conversation. Burnie came at Joel questioning, asking what his problem was, why he kept dying and why he seemed so distracted and why he wanted to know how to die for real. And Joel came back defensive, arguing hypotheticals and how humans aren’t meant to live forever, there was to be a point, what does a story matter if you take away it’s last chapter?

They went round and round and round. Geoff almost thought it was going no where.

And then there was a beat, a lull in the argument, and Joel’s voice cracked as he said he _couldn’t_ live forever, he _wanted_ to die. 

How were they supposed to continue like that?

* * *

Short answer: they weren’t.

Long answer: it ended up not mattering. It was only a week after that revelation, after realizing Joel was cracking apart at the seams and maybe they all would, too, eventually, that there was an attack. It wasn’t the first, second, or even hundredth time they’d been attacked.

But it was the first time the attacker had found their base, and found where Matt and Gus were stationed. They wanted to cut off the Roosters power at the source.

So they blew it up. 

And that’s how they learned they weren’t all immortal. 

Gus was. Matt wasn’t. 

And that was the beginning of the end for the Roosters. 

They tried, really they did, to power through the major loss. But decades of most of them being immortal had led to them forgetting how much death really could affect them. They forgot what the overwhelming loss of a friend dying truly felt like. And they didn’t know how to come back from that.

Gus was the first to go. He had newfound immortality and didn’t know what to do with it, but he didn’t want to stay here and keep doing what they were doing. He _couldn’t_.

Burnie left next. He gave more warning, at least. Set Geoff up to keep running the city, even without the Roosters. And then he left, with no hint as to where he was going or what he was looking for.

It was Joel who gave the most detail. Joel who’d been breaking down long before this, Joel who now didn’t know what he was doing or what he was feeling, just knew he couldn’t stay here in the city where death chased him at every corner. He took off, told them he was going East. Told them he’d keep in contact when he could. He actually seemed like he meant it, too. 

And then there were two.

Geoff hadn’t planned on recruiting Jack into a life of crime when he met him, but left as king of the city with no team, he needed a knew plan. And Jack seemed like just the guy.

It’s Jack who posed the question. If they existed, why couldn’t there be other immortals? 

And that was the thought Geoff kept in his head as he set out to recruit a new team. He had no name for them, no plan, but he knew this time he wouldn’t let anything happen to them, no matter what.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you all enjoyed this ! i'm sorry it took so long. 
> 
> upcoming chapters include ryan’s death, maybe a ryan + jeremy murder buddies story, and a joel + adam ellis spin-off bc i offhandedly mentioned the two of them a couple of times now and,,,,also i really really like writing neurotic wants-to-die joel 
> 
> pls comment and leave kudos?


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